You’re welcome to use the
workshop materials
for any purpose, including your own workshop.
If you do, I’d love to hear about it.

Some firsts

I’ve spoken at several instances of
pkgsrcCon
(including
twice
in nearby
Berlin),
but that’s more like a hackathon with some talks.
Agile Testing Days was a proper conference, with hundreds of
people and plenty of conferring.
If someone asks whether I’m an “international speaker”,
or claims I am one,
I now won’t feel terribly uncomfortable going along with it.

At the Tuesday morning
Lean Coffee,
I found a bug in myself (not a first).

What I expected from many previous Lean Coffees:
I’d have to control myself to not say all the ideas and suggestions that
come to mind.

What happened at this Lean Coffee:
It was very easy to listen, because I didn’t have many ideas or
suggestions, because the topics came from people who were mostly
testers.

Conclusions I immediately drew:

Come to think of it, I have not played every role on a team. I don’t
know what it’s like to be a tester. Maybe my guesses about what it’s
like are less wrong than some others, but they’re still gonna be
wrong.

This is evidently my first conference that’s more testing than
Agile. Cool! I bet I can learn a lot here.

Some nexts

My next gig will be remote coaching, centered around what we notice as
we’re pair programming and delivering working software.
I’ve done plenty of
coaching
and plenty of
remote work,
but not usually at the same time.
Thanks to Lean Coffee with folks like Janet and
Alex Schladebeck,
I got some good advice on being a more effective
influencer
when it takes more intention and effort to have face-to-face interactions.

Janet: Ask questions that help people recognize their own situation.
(Helping people orient themselves in their problem spaces is one of my
go-to strengths. I’m ready to be leaning harder on it.)

As I learn about remote coaching, I expect to write things down at
Shape My Work,
a wiki about distributed Agile that
Alex Harms
and I created.
You’ll notice it has a Code of Conduct.
If it makes good sense to you, we’d love to learn what you’ve learned as
a remote Agilist.

I found Agile Testing Days to be a lovingly organized and carefully
tuned mix of coffee breaks, efficiency, flexibility, and whimsy.
The love and whimsy shone through.
I’m honored to have been part of it, and I sure as heck hope to be back
next year.

We’d be back next year anyway; we visit family in Germany every December.
Someday we might choose to live near them for a while.
It occurs to me that having participated in Agile Testing Days
might well have been an early investment in that option, and the thought
pleases me.
(As does the thought of hopping on a train to participate again.)

I’m in Europe through Christmas.
I consult,
coach,
and train.
Do you know of anyone who could use a day or three of my services?

One aspect of being a tester I do identify with is being frequently
challenged to explain their discipline or justify their decisions to
people who don’t know what the work is like (and might not recognize the
impact of their not knowing).
In that regard, I wonder how helpful
Agile in 3 Minutes
is for testers.

Let’s say I could be so lucky as to have a few guest episodes about testing.
Who would be the first few people you’d want to hear from?
Who has a way with words and ideas, knows the work, and can speak to it
— in their unique voice —
to help the rest of us understand a bit better?